In every movie, tv show, book, whatever in which there is a premodern execution (by which I mean, ax, guillotine, etc., not electric chair or lethal injection) the executioner is always wearing a mask. Why is this?
Anonymity. Would you want people knowing you killed their brother, the bank robber? I’m sure they didn’t.
But that’s the media for you.
I’m sure in real life the sheriff or a deputy pulled the switch for the gallows, well, as far as old west executions go.
Recent thread on this topic: The masked executioner: various historical questions.
It was also done out of fear that the victim’s spirit would remember the executioner’s face, and haunt them after death.
Okay, but I think there’s something else going on, namely that the execution is done not by the person who actually drops the ax or flips the switch, but by the state. In execution by firing squad–I think I remember this from that Utah case–one of the marksmen has blanks, and none of the marksmen know which one has blanks.
I thought it was like 5 men shot the rifles, and maybe 3 would have blanks so that the odds were that if you shot the gun, you actually shot a blank and didn’t kill any person.
I think this was done to relieve the consciouses (spell) of the firing squad members.
In the Gary Gilmore case (Utah, 1977) there were five executioners, and one of them had a blank. I have a vague recollection from the news at the time that one of the men claimed he looked in his rifle and knew it wasn’t a blank and didn’t fire, but my memory might be wrong.
Cite (mentions the number of executioners but nothing about any of them not firing):
http://cbsnews.cbs.com/htdocs/capital/whois_gilmore.html
The same sort of thing is done with other types of executions as well. Electric chairs are often wired up with two or more switches so that the men who pull the switches aren’t sure if they were the ones pulling the live switch or not. Lethal injections are done either by having people manually inject the different chemicals into a bag, or by an automated machine. In the case of the bag, there are sometimes several bags and the injectors do not know which one is actually connected to the victim. In the case of the automated machine there are usually several switches only one of which actually operates the machine.
I think the answer has more to do with politics than with superstitions about ghosts haunting executioners, and all that. An execution is a symbolic ritual in which The State (and not any particular Tom, Dick, or Harry) is exacting the ultimate punishment by taking someone’s life, so it would be a bit symbolically confusing if the identity of the executioner was obvious during this ritual…if it were clear that Tom Smith was hacking off the victim’s head, and not some anonymous, masked stand-in for, say, England.
I’ve heard this before, but it seems silly to me.
Surely any expert rifleman firing the gun will know if he fired a real bullet vs. a blank, just by the recoil alone.
But if he really wants to think he fired blanks, I’m sure he could convince himself.
My friends who fire blanks (in TV and film) tell me that the same amount of powder is used in a blank as in a real bullet.
The same amount of powder but there is not as much resistance in inertia from the projectile itself.
You can tell.
I’m sure one of our resident firearms experts will give us the full breakdown on this, but I believe there are many classes of ‘blanks’, some of which have no projectile at all (i.e. the plastic split-tip rounds I used to pick up as a kid) whereas others have a ‘bullet’ made of paper, wood or similar which disintegrates after leaving the barrell. I can imagine one of the latter type would provide appreciable recoil, since they are capable of killing people if fired at very close range.
A friend had some of the wooden bullet blanks in 8mm Mouser. Nothing penitrated a piece of cardboard at a range of 2" or so. We concluded they were perfectly safe to fire into the air as a salute. I don’t know what, but “something” happens to the wood before it travels even that far.
Depends on what time and place we’re talking about I think. Being an executioner is being a creepy fellow who kills people, hence outside of the society of the living. In old Europe, the executioner was masked at least partly because he didn’t want anybody to know who he was. That person would execute his ability to live among other human beings if everybody saw his face. (This was before taking another man’s life was “cool”, I guess.) And since nobody wants to kill somebody for money, the executioner was often drunk too, and needed to work with that axe a few times before the he managed to chop the head off. – No one wants to see such scenes (and you know people appreciated a fine execution), which is one reason the guillotine was invented.
In short: No one wants to be the executioner, though everybody wanna see the guy dead.